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From Bedrooms To Billions is a two-hour documentary about the UK games development scene, how it started and how it got where it is today. Lots of the old C64, Spectrum and BBC classics will be covered and it will feature interviews with a great number of legends like Matthew Smith (Manic Miner), Jon Hare (Sensible Software), David Braben (Elite), Rob Hubbard (famed C64 musician), David Darling (Codemasters founder), Julian Rignall (Zzap!64 reviewer), Martin Galway (another legenday C64 composer), Jeff Minter (oh come on, you know who this is), Dave Perry (this too), just to name a few. This kickstarter is a little shady in my book. You see, this project was allready successfully funded on another crowd-funding site indiegogo.com. They chose that site then because Kickstarter was only open to US-based companies, until recently. Anyway, this new crowd-funding drive is for improved post-production apparently. The documentary is by and large finished, all interviews have been made and so on. But in its current state it would only be two hours of talking heads. With this extra money they can add some proper music (by old legends), graphics work and make the whole thing more interesting. I allready funded it on indiegogo, so won't be backing this one (that soundtrack option sure looks nice though). Their goal of £18,000 has allready been met, so no worries there at least.

Another that's made waves today is Torment: Tides of Numenera. This is a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment. It is not a direct sequel, but a new game with new characters in a new setting. So it won't be a D&D Planescape game. Otherwise this new game will stay true to the original's roots by having a large focus on making a high quality, thought provoking story with rich dialouge. It is being developed by Inxile Entertainment with Brian Fargo in the lead. They have many of the original team leads back, and I think Chris Avellone is involved. Mark Morgan is back doing the music. Several writers of the original story are returning. This looks promising indeed. They're asking for $900,000. The kickstarter was launched four hours ago, and they're passing $700,000 literally as I'm writing this. This one will probably set a new kickstarter record, the current one being held by Project Eternity which was just a few thousand dollars shy of hitting $4,000,000. (Project Eternity is another spiritual successor to old-school RPG's, Baldur's Gate in this case. Has also much of the original team back. Looks like this is a popular theme, allright.)

Seems it's a good week for old-school RPGs: Richard Garriot, aka Lord British, wants funds for Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues. Lord British is famous for being the brain behind the entire Ultima series. He promises a fully immersive and interactive role-playing world. There'll be a rich story and the world will be well developed with races, religions, politics and so on. There's a classless character system which hasn't been elaborated further on yet. Basically he says he wants to bring roleplaying back to roleplaying games. He feels modern RPGs have been reduced to just level grinding with only a few initial character choices. This is going to be different, apparently. He has a very experienced team behind him with individuals who has worked on a long list of well-known titles. They're asking for $1,000,000 and though it hasn't got the incredible response that Torment got, they are nearly halfway there after a little more than a day.

Yes, it would be brilliant if he manages to raise the money for Shroud of the Avatar.

And I agree regarding modern RPGs. As much as I love playing them, many have a lot of grinding and fixate on mindless, boring side quests where you just run errands all day to level up and gain enough money to buy the items you need to pass a location to progress in the game world. The majority of MMOs are even more guilty of this. I loved some of the old Ultima games so it will be great to see a return of their creators next ideas.

I also wish they could come up with a better design for online MMOs. I've played SWTOR since beta and love the game, but this is very guilty of these things. Having to travel the same parts of a map over and over to complete quests before triggering a main mission quest to progress in the character's story starts to get boring after a couple of hours in one location. You don't however need to grind to progress so that is something it achieved.

If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!

C64 music legend Matt Gray wants to make an album of remakes of his old music. Best known for Last Ninja 2, the rest of his C64 music is also very good. It's definitely going to be a double album, with further discs added as stretch goals. There's a separate Last Ninja 2 bonus disc if you pledge high enough, also available on vinyl. There's even a special edition at £55 where the album comes in a videogame-style big box with the cds in imitation 5,25" floppy sleeves. I'm excited about this one. I really like his music, and he released a test remake on soundcloud and bandcamp to test the waters before going all in with this, and that sounds great! It's still the first day and it has nearly £8,000 of its £25,000 goal so shouldn't have any trouble succeeding.

The Elite Archives is a book detailing every Elite release there ever was, with pictures of each individual release, details of everything included in the boxes, comments on the version's strong and weak points, how they reviewed, etc. Lots of classic Elite details on offer here. The funding goal has already been reached and there is only two days left so be quick if you want to grab this along with some perks.